It’s true. In just a fortnight, I shall be reuniting with all those people with whom I graduated from high school.
Facebook only makes the whole thing all the more weird.
Basically, there are all of these people on our class Fb page who apparently have a lot of investment in the whole “reuniting” thing. They also enjoy “memories” and talking about dead people.
So far, what’s most interesting about this whole experience is realizing how different my memories of high school are from those of my classmates (or at least from the memories of the folks who are blowing up our class’s Fb page). This is not to say that I had a bad time in high school. I totally didn’t. I enjoyed high school. I had fun. I wasn’t an outcast or bullied or unhappy. No, high school was fine.
But what I think is different about me vs. a lot of those people in my graduating class is that while I enjoyed high school, those years were certainly not the best years of my life. They were fun, and I had good friends. But you know what? I’ve made a lot of friends since then, and I’ve had a lot of fun since then. So what makes me weird is that I really and truly have no nostalgia for high school. And, really, I don’t remember a lot of it. Not in a “dude, I was so stoned!” way, nor in a “I was tripping through my whole junior year” way, nor in a “so and so’s house parties rocked!” way. Dude, I was the editor of my high school newspaper and I was in Latin club. I was not fucked up, in a chemical sense, except for on very rare occasions, in high school. No, I just don’t remember much of it because it wasn’t all that important to me.
So if I’m not nostalgic, then is my hope that I’ll “reconnect” with people? Nah, not so much. I figure that if I’m not in touch with you now then it’s that I don’t really care if I’m in touch. So not only do I not have a longing for the past, but I really don’t have some desire for a connection in the present with these people. As I said to my High School BFF, my feeling about what’s great about the whole “reunion” thing is that I won’t need to talk to anybody for more than 5-10 minutes.
So why am I going? I mean, seriously, if I don’t have the nostalgia, and if I don’t want to “reconnect”…. What is my point?
Honestly? I think that it’s because I want to sit in judgment. I think that I want to judge how all of us have turned out – I want to judge myself in relation to these people who come from where I come from, and I want to judge us all in relation to where I would hope that we would be. Yes, I’m judgmental.
The other thing that I think is motivating me is that I’m just curious. I’m curious to see who shows up and who doesn’t. I’m curious to see who’s an asshole still and who isn’t. I’m curious to see what people from then have become. Sure, it might be a morbid curiosity, but it’s curiosity.
But finally, it’s this: I’m really hoping that this experience will show me that I’m a grown-up. Last weekend, BES had a wedding reception-y thing (she had a really small wedding a few weeks ago; this was an after-the-wedding sort of thing), and she invited me, and I went, and while I was invited to go out with her parents and all the “old people” after, I somehow ended up going out dancing with all the 25-year-olds and then having a deep after-hours talk with BES about the state of the world and academia and heart-to-heart nonsense until 5 am and ending up sleeping on a bean-bag-chair until BES and Hubby of BES (HBES henceforth) drove me to my car in the morning. Because you know what? It was more fun to go dancing! And that’s great, sure, but at a certain point, shouldn’t I feel like it’s not more fun to go dancing than to go for a drink with the people who are grown-ups like me? And then to go home like a responsible person at 10:30 pm or something?
Clearly, I’m not there yet. Maybe I will get there if I see all the people who graduated from high school with me? Or, more likely, I’ll discover that it’s just fine that I am exactly as I am. Because seriously: I probably will never be a person who doesn’t want to go dancing. Maybe I need to accept that about myself.
Fortnight?!?!?!? AHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I use the most fun words for two weeks *ever*!
ExCUSE me, what’s so fun about a standard word in common use?
You USians are really wierd sometimes.
As I read the post, I was wondering why you wanted to go. Thanks for not leaving your loyal blog readers hanging!
It still wouldn’t have been enough of a draw for me. I’ve skipped every high school and college reunion. Maybe it’s because I graduated a year early from high school so that I know maybe ten of the two hundred people in my “graduating class”. And university reunions seem even more pointless – be one with ten thousand plus others?
I also admit that, for this, Facebook is useful. It lets me know what former classmates have done and what they haven’t. Via Facebook, I found that one person against whom I constantly measured myself had gotten stalled by other circumstances and not achieved what so many had expected. It gave me no pleasure but more of an inward rebuke at wasting so much of my own life on that old viewpoint.
Still, go dancing, go be yourself and go have a splendid time. Let them see how brightly your light shines!
I recently reconnected with two peripheral high school friends — and I found out that some high school friends are a lot more interesting now. Of course, some won’t be — some will quiz you on why you aren’t married, with kids, blah, blah blah — but there will be some nice surprises.
And likely, there will be dancing. And you’ll probably be the best at it, since your practice is the most recent. Get your wiggle on, and I hope you have a blast.
I recommend Romy & Michelle’s HS Reunion before you go, if you’ve never seen it. Very funny, although it’s a 10th and not a 20th reunion.
I think you should go because you’re curious, not because you want to judge your former classmates. But, yes: I share your bemusement with the whole “best days of our lives” attitude towards HS. If HS turned out in retrospect to be the best days of my life, I think I’d be pretty depressed about that. Like you, I feel lucky about my life, and that things only got better & better for me.
Dude. You do not need to hang with the twenty-five-year-olds to find people who want to go drinking and dancing. (Though I admit that, among hetero folk, it’s less common the older we get.) Maybe you’ll meet/reconnect with some partying peeps at your reunion?
Me, I was on the dance floor at my 15-year college reunion until the thing shut down at 1 or 1.30. Were there many people left then? No. But I decided I loved every single one who was.
Curiosity is a good reason to go to a high school reunion (I went to my 5th, my 10th, my 20th, and, last fall, my 30th). Unfortunately, reunions do not provide a representative sample of a high school class. The people who show up at my high school’s reunions are the people who still live in the area or have family members in the area. My high school classmate who is now a distinguished political scientist at the University of Chicago is never there. (The classmate who is serving a life sentence for murder is never there, either.)
“Growing up” is a broad concept, of course: there is a good kind and a bad kind. One guy at my last high school reunion still makes stupid jokes about the anatomical connotations of one Vice Principal’s name. He should grow up. On the other hand, the growing up that stops you from wanting to dance is better avoided!
College is a different matter (Flavia, you have written good posts on these reunions.) For one thing, high school is usually more diverse, particularly in terms of social class. And, for many of us, a high school reunion is a kind of childhood reunion. Some of the people who graduated from high school my year also attended my grade school. Yes, there were several people at my last reunion whom I have known since Lyndon Johnson was President.
I am pretty convinced I am going to feel about 27 years of age for, like, ever – even though I’m well past that now. I am always the person who would rather go dancing that hang out with the “older” group. I don’t feel like an adult at all and at this point I fear I never will! There are worse things, I guess!
Echoing Historiann’s suggestion about Romy & Michele: just tell them that you invented Post-Its.
[...] darlings, I have returned home from a week in Hometown, and most of the week was devoted to the reuniting with the class of 1992. As I wrote in anticipation of the event, part of my motivation for going was because I wanted an [...]
It has been 32 years since I left high school in the past and have not looked back..can’t say that I would ever attend a reunion or any social function related to it. It was a long time ago, I have grown up, away and beyond the high school culture. I am proud to say my glory days were not spent within the confines of school doing what would gain tha admiration and approval of the staff and moreso the students.
Our school has an alumni site, I recognize only a handful of names and fewer friends. What interested me then, what I had in common with others is no longer of any concern to me. What was of such great importance, the culture of high school is totally irrelevant in the grown up adult world. The bulk of the experience, less the education has no impact on life after high school.
I can not get nostalgic about it, there is nothing either good or bad about it that I wish to re live. Not even for an evening.